*unedumacated*
by Rach
Shanghai, China
When we were planning our northern China leg we had no idea what there was to see or do in Shanghai. In fact, if it were not for the fact that a friend was living here, we would not have even considered stopping here. But somehow, in spite of the fact that said friend had returned to blue-skied New Zealand, we found ourselves booking train tickets to this place. And a hostel for a couple of nights. Our plan was to visit China’s must-see museum and we were wondering aloud to each other what “The Bund” was, that all the hostels claimed to be situated near. So unilluminated were we, that we thought it was a German word and we realised there was another gap to be filled in our history knowledge – we knew French, Portugese and British had been round these parts, but Germans? We had no idea the word was actually an Anglo-Indian term for the embankment along the Huangpo River. Come to think of it, we didn’t even know the name of the river – but the kids were asking what the river would be called, because every city we have been to has been situated on a river (so ingrained is the expectation that the younger ones couldn’t drop the habit of calling our harbour crossings in Hong Kong “river crossings”…..naturally, we have discussed WHY cities would grow around a river, coz we’re not totally uneducated, you know). And we didn’t know that The Bund used to be situated right next to the river, just feet away, until in the mid-1990s a flood barrier was built and so now it is above the level of the road. This relatively new (in terms of the over 1,000 years the city has been here) position affords the many foreign and Chinese tourists, who amble along, an excellent view of the “vagabond assortment of neoclassical 1930s downtown New York styles and monumental antiquity”, which line one side of the river and “the geometry of the future in Pudong’s skyline” across the river (quotes from Lonely Planet).
and the other side……
Thanks to our guidebook, we were even prepared for the “gaggles of wide-eyed out-of-towners”. Not sure our encounter was what the LP writers had in mind when they penned the words, accurate as they may have been! As you can see, ER2 is coping admirably with the onslaught now, and even tolerates being picked up by total strangers – such a development in her “social education” 😉
!look at those rascals escaping!
So now we have an idea or two about Shanghai. It is a tall sprawling city; a spread-out Hong Kong, if you will. It has a population of 18 million, five million of them being not residents, but people who nonetheless stay for longer than six months. In every square kilometre you’ll find 55,000 people. In our home town (it almost sounds illegitimately boastful to call it a town!!) there are only 2,500 people per square km, and over the whole country, a mere 15 souls/km. No wonder this place feels crowded!
It is also a polluted city. We’ve only been here a day and we are suffering from sore throats, stinging eyes and runny noses. Perhaps it has been a particularly bad day – I don’t know – but the air actually *feels* gritty and the horizon is not smoggy grey, but brown. None of us had seen brown air before today. Before we came, we knew it was bad (though allegedly not as bad as Beijing), but we really had NO IDEA that it would be brown or that the city’s innovative environment department would have a novel air pollution index; they measure air pollution via comparisons to cigarette brands, because Shanghai’s air pollution levels fall off the scale of more conventional systems. So today we smoked half a dozen packets of cigarettes 😉 Each.
And got a wee bit more educated.
Tags: children, health, history, learning, parenting, postcard: China, recreation, weather
rayres
Loving your stories Rachael.